NYP: Yankees Gotta Believe – Just Recall '04 Red Sox

The pre-game program was built around one of Rivera's greatest failures, a pitch-by-pitch accounting of the Red Sox rallying in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS. ...

For these 2013 Yankees, though, what they needed to see was not Rivera's dignity, but rather the subtle context of possibility.

Understand those 2004 Red Sox were as close to a baseball grave as a team could be. It is one thing to be down 3-0 in a best-of-seven, a deficit from which – at that point – no club ever had rebounded. It is another to be coming off a 19-8 humiliation in Game 3. ... Still another to be three outs from continuing the greatest self-fulfilling prophecy in sports – the doom and gloom that came with The Curse.

And there on the mound to get those three outs was Rivera. The greatest closer ever. Greater in the playoffs.

Boston's probability of winning that game, much less that series, much less eight straight games to take both the ALCS and their first World Series in 86 years, was microscopic, tinier than tiny, certainly smaller than 6.5 percent, which is how Coolstandings.com projected the Yanks' chances of making the playoffs on Monday morning following the lost weekend at Fenway.

There is an opportunity for the Yankees here. But is their self-belief intact? Because it starts there. These Yankees have an awful lot of work to do over the final 12 games simply to reach a one-game wild-card play-in, loser go home and winner almost certainly face the Red Sox – which for the Yankees feels like go home soon after. ...

In an attempt to honor Rivera or themselves, the Red Sox showed the Yankees a film that should be a reminder to keep hope alive.

7 comments:

He's not wrong (about the Yankees chances anyway) and that's an interesting way to look at it. Though I don't think there's a statistic yet invented that shows the 2013 Yankees to be anywhere near as good a team as the 2004 Red Sox.

To mattymatty's point, the difference is that the 2004 Red Sox was a great team, if not one of the best in franchise history. Yes, the ALCS comeback was nothing short of miraculous, but Boston had a club that year loaded with talent.

The 2013 Yankees are currently 79-71 in the standings but the team's Pythagorean win-loss record is 73-77, a difference of six games in their favor (in comparison, the Sox's Pythagorean W-L record is 93-58, one win less than their current record). The talent of the current 2013 Yankees roster is not on the same level as the 2004 Sox.

To say the 2004 team was loaded with talent is a bit of an overstatement. They had an infield made up Mueller, Cabrera, Bellhorn, Millar and Mentkiewicz. At the time neither of those guys were the best at their postions. The pitching was real good. But loaded with talent I dont really agree.